First Blood, Kinda Sorta
by Suki59
Summary: Tied for first in the public vote for The First Blood Contest. Eric is traumatized by his first kill while mountain climbing with Bill in the Rockies. Poor Selah falls to her death, and Eric thinks he's Sylvester Stallone. Can Sookie save him? AU


**First Blood Contest**

**Title: First Blood, Kinda Sorta**

**Writer status: Serial **

**Beta: Thyra10**

**Characters: Sookie, Eric and Bill**

**Disclaimer: I don't own the Southern Vampire Mysteries or Cliffhanger or Rocky or Rambo or any other movie, for that matter.**

**A/N: I'm so excited that this story tied for first place in the public vote for the First Blood Contest! Thanks so much to those who read, reviewed, and/or voted for it. Sapfirerose made me this hysterical banner. Is it wrong to laugh at Selah falling to her death? H t t p : / / 1 . bp . blogspot . com/_O_3GJq9rfjo/TPaNFGOn64I/AAAAAAAAAPE/tDF3XHkVW_8/s1600/kinda-sorta . gif (Remove all spaces before the number "1" and around all dots.)**

**Rated T, Parody-Drama**

**Summary: Sookie goes to Eric, who is traumatized by his first kill while mountain climbing with Bill in the Rockies. Poor Selah falls to her death, and Eric thinks he's Sylvester Stallone. Can Sookie save him? AU**

I was fairly surprised when Eric and Bill opened their own mountain climbing tour guide business in the Colorado Rockies, but then I guess it kind of made sense. Both were incapable of being killed no matter how many times they fell, and of course, Eric's ability to fly would prevent any falling accidents involving their clients. I guess when you've lived as long as they have, it's hard to come up with challenging career choices.

Eric and I had broken up. I had no desire to move up into the mountains with him and he needed a new start somewhere. We kept in touch by phone and email and occasional sexting until we discovered skype and got really good at that. (I had a stripper pole installed in my office, which helped a lot.)

You can imagine my surprise the day I got a text from Bill that simply said: Eric's lost it. Come right away.

I jumped into my helicopter and flew to their camp up in the mountains and found, to my surprise, Eric and Bill sitting inside their tiny office—a small building precariously perched on the side of the mountain. The reason it was so shocking was that it was broad daylight and both vampires were just sitting behind their desks with blood oozing from their ears and nostrils.

"Eric! Bill!" I shouted as soon as I entered the office. "What the heck? It's daytime and you're both walking around!"

"Oh, hi, Sookie," Bill said cheerfully. "Yeah, we've been watching True Blood and were shocked to discover that we could stay up during the day with really no consequences except for a little bleeding from our various orifices." He turned his head and pointed to a tampon sticking from his ear. Then he lifted his shirttail and showed me the white plastic fabric protruding from the waistband of his pants. He just said, "Depends," by way of explanation.

"TMI, Bill," I said in response.

"Right. Sorry."

"So, what's the big emergency?" I asked and looked at Eric, who had a red strip of fabric tied around his forehead, I assumed to keep his ear tampons in place.

Eric just looked at me blankly and said, "Yo, Adrian."

"Huh?" I asked.

Bill set his ipod on his desk and turned on the theme song from Rocky. Eric jumped up and started doing some fancy boxing moves. He was wearing gray sweats and that's when I realized something was terribly wrong with him. He knew that gray was not a good color for him since he'd had his colors done and discovered he was a "Spring."

Bill motioned for me to step outside, and I did. He joined me, to my utter astonishment.

"Bill, how is it possible for you to be out here in the sunlight?" I asked.

"Again, thanks to HBO, we discovered that we can take small periods of sun exposure since both Eric and I have had your blood. I'll talk fast since I'll start to sizzle in just a few minutes."

I nodded, encouraging him to continue quickly.

Bill told me the story of a very recent accident. Selah Pumphrey was one of their clients, and while she was crossing between two mountain tops on a rope, her harness broke and she was left clinging to the rope over a deep chasm. Eric shimmied out onto the rope to grab her and pull her to safety, but she slipped and he caught her hand at the last second, just dangling her over the empty space.

For some unknown reason, Eric panicked and seemed to forget that he could fly. As Selah's hand slipped from his, he watched in horror while she plummeted to her death below.

Bill shouted out to Eric from his perch on top of the mountain, asking why he didn't fly down to catch her. Eric seemed to snap out of his stupor and flew down into the dark, deep canyon. Bill climbed down the side of the mountain and found Eric at the bottom, stuffing the remains of Selah into a crystal candy jar and weeping.

"I wanted to turn her, but there wasn't enough left," Eric choked out between sobs.

"Don't worry about it, Eric," Bill answered sympathetically. "She wasn't even my girlfriend anymore. No biggie."

"No, Bill. You're wrong! This is a biggie!" Eric said. "This is the first time I've ever really killed anyone."

At this point, Bill stopped the story and we both started to try and think of other people Eric had killed, but we couldn't really think of a single one. All the characters that Charlaine Harris had written about that Eric had killed in her books had miraculously been resurrected in fanfiction stories.

"Oh my god, Bill, Eric was right. Selah really was his first real kill!"

At that point, Bill's face had started to bubble up and so we went back inside. Eric was still hopping around, throwing punches into the air and mumbling to himself.

"Oh dear," I said to Bill. "It's heartbreaking. He's babbling incoherently."

"No, actually, he's just talking, but it's much harder to understand him now that he thinks he's Sylvester Stallone," Bill explained.

I turned off the music and took Eric's hand. "Don't worry, sweetie, you'll be okay. We'll figure something out," I said to him.

He just looked at me sadly and repeated, "Yo, Adrian."

Just at that moment, we were interrupted by an S.O.S. call coming from the radio sitting on Bill's desk.

"Help us!" the plea rang out. "Our plane crashed and we need to be rescued."

Bill grabbed the microphone and spoke into it, "Can you give us your location?"

"We're trapped in the snow, at the foot of a mountain. Hurry! Some of these guys don't have any lines or even names for their characters and I'm pretty sure they're going to die out here. I can't imagine they'll make it much past this scene."

"We're on our way!" Bill said and then he jumped up and started to put on his mountain-climbing gear.

"Wait!" I said. "That man sounded suspiciously like John Lithgow. I think it might be a trap!"

"Don't be ridiculous, Sookie. Why would John Lithgow try to trap us?"

"Why? I can't believe you'd even ask that question. Since he won all those Emmys for Third Rock from the Sun, he hasn't had any decent roles. This is his chance for high drama."

Bill just shook his head and continued gearing up. I looked over at Eric and he was pulling his sweat shirt over his head, revealing a string of bullets draped across his bare chest. He took a bottle of baby oil from his desk drawer and started oiling up his muscles, careful to avoid the bullets.

Once he was all shiny, he clenched a big hunting knife between his teeth and pulled a machine gun from the desk drawer. He pointed the gun at the door, let out a loud battle cry (through clenched teeth), and started shooting.

Bill ran over and grabbed the gun from him and said, "What are you doing?"

Eric looked stunned and answered, "I like the way my titties jiggle when I shoot like that."

"Well, save it for the rescue, Rambo!" Bill said, exasperated.

The three of us started out the door when I said, "Wait! Won't you two fry like bacon after we've been out there for awhile?"

"Right," Bill answered.

We all sat back down and relaxed until the sun set, which took several hours. I did my nails and Bill and Eric played backgammon. After about the tenth radio transmission from John Lithgow begging for help, Bill turned down the volume and said, "I can't take much more of that."

He and Eric snickered until I gave them a dirty look.

It was finally dusk, and Bill and Eric yanked out their ear tampons and we all headed out to save the survivors.

We rappelled down the face of the mountain and found a small group of people huddled together in the snow at the bottom of a crevasse. They were half-frozen and some had blood on them, but they had managed to build a small fire to survive and all had sticks with marshmallows on the ends stuck into the flames.

"Thank god you're alive!" I said, as we came upon them.

"We're saved!" John Lithgow exclaimed. He jumped up and thanked us. "I can't tell you how happy we are to see you," he continued. "S'more?"

I let him fix me a treat since I hadn't had any actual food since my arrival. After we all had some snacks and told a few ghost stories, we decided it was time to hike to safety.

"Wait!" Mr. Lithgow said. "We have to find the three suitcases that fell out of the plane as it was crashing. I have these nifty transmitters that will lead us straight to them."

"What could possibly be worth risking all our lives to find in those suitcases, Mr. Lithgow?" I asked.

"Uh … my Emmys! Yeah, that's right. My Emmys are in them."

I looked at Bill and Eric (whose oily muscles were starting to turn me on) and said, "Can you believe this guy?"

"He's right," Bill said. "I think we all know how hard those are to come by. Stephen Moyer and Alexander Skarsgard have suffered through three seasons of True Blood without a single one."

"Alright then," I conceded. "Let's get started."

Mr. Lithgow handed out walkie talkies so we could stay in touch if we got separated and he turned on the transmitter thingy that would lead us to the three suitcases.

We finished up the marshmallows and began our trek.

We trudged through the snow for hours in sub-zero temperatures. It was eerily quiet except for the crunch of our boots in the snow and Eric's humming of the Rocky theme.

When we finally came upon the first suitcase, Mr. Lithgow pounced on it, hissing, "My preciousssss."

I'd never seen anyone so excited to find luggage before, but then again, I'd also never won an Emmy.

"May I see that?" I asked.

Mr. Lithgow gave me an evil look and I began to suspect that there was something else in the suitcase. Apparently, so did Eric because he grabbed the suitcase from Mr. Lithgow's hands and popped it open with the hunting knife he'd been holding between his teeth all night.

Stacks of money began to tumble out of the suitcase. Mr. Lithgow pulled a gun from his parka and aimed it at Eric.

I screamed, "Noooo," as Mr. Lithgow pulled the trigger.

Suddenly the ground beneath our feet began to tremble and I knew in an instant that the gunshot had started an avalanche.

I turned just in time to see Eric flying backwards over a cliff, propelled by the momentum of the gunshot to his chest. That was the last image I saw before I was covered in a heavy blanket of snow. I could hear the screams of the men around me and the avalanche itself sounded like a freight train, but I was trapped by the heavy snow and could do nothing but wait until the avalanche had stopped.

Once it became still and quiet again, I began to dig through the snow. I was disoriented and unsure which way was up. I thought of Eric's greased-up pecs jiggling when he was shooting that machine gun and when my drool dribbled down my chin, I knew in which direction to dig. Soon, I broke through the snow and saw the night sky above me.

I pulled myself from the snow and looked around to see Bill sucking the neck of a limp figure before tossing the body off the cliff. He wiped the blood from his mouth and reached through the snow, pulling another unconscious man out and biting into his neck.

As soon as he had thrown that one over the cliff, I said, "Bill, what are you doing?"

"Killing these idiots." He just shrugged and started to dig again.

"Wait, Bill. I have an idea. Eric's identity crisis started when he accidentally killed Selah, right?"

"Yeah."

"Well, maybe he'll snap out of it if we give him a chance to rescue us. Save some of the bad guys so they can continue to terrorize us and then Eric will feel obligated to save us. Maybe then he'll get back to being himself."

"You're right, Sookie. Saving you always was one of his favorite hobbies. That should really cheer him up."

Bill pulled the rest of the bad guys (including John Lithgow) from the snow and brushed them off and stood them upright. Mr. Lithgow checked his transmitter thingy again and announced the location of the next suitcase. (The first one was hopelessly buried beneath us in the snow.)

We all set off to find the second suitcase, and this time, I desperately hoped that Eric would come to our rescue before we found it. I really wasn't up for another shooting and subsequent avalanche.

As the transmitter thingy began to beep loudly, indicating the nearness of the suitcase, Mr. Lithgow ran ahead of us. I watched him drop to his knees and clutch the suitcase with madness in his eyes.

Suddenly, one of his men pulled a gun from his boot and aimed it at Mr. Lithgow.

"Open that up," the nameless man demanded.

"No way," Mr. Lithgow responded. "You're just an extra. Who told you you could say that line?"

"Actually, Mr. Lithgow," Bill interrupted, "I think I drained all the extras back at the avalanche. This guy has a name and everything. You'd better do as he says."

Mr. Lithgow reluctantly opened the suitcase and we all gasped when we saw its contents. Inside was a single thousand-dollar bill and a note that said, "Want to Trade? Yours truly, Sylvester Stallone."

Mr. Lithgow looked up, confusion written on his face.

"Eric thinks he's Sylvester Stallone," I explained. "He suffered a traumatic event—his first kill, and now he's having a little identity crisis."

"Ah, I see," Mr. Lithgow nodded. "That explains the bandolier."

"Huh?" I asked.

"The string of bullets he had slung across his body."

"Right," I said.

"And the headband."

"Yes," I agreed. "But don't be mistaken. He's still a dangerous vampire. And killing a few more people might be just the thing to get him over this little crisis."

"Let's go!" Mr. Lithgow ordered.

The extra (or day player, most likely) with the gun fell into line with the rest of the men as we all headed out to find the third suitcase.

I was exhausted from the climb, but we finally came upon the third suitcase. Mr. Lithgow knelt and opened it and we all saw that it was completely empty.

"Obviously, Eric got here first," I said triumphantly.

The walkie talkie in Mr. Lithgow's jacket pocket crackled to life and I heard Eric's unmistakable voice (doing an excellent imitation of Sylvester Stallone).

"Murdoch, I'm coming to get you," Eric said.

Mr. Lithgow creased his brow and spoke into his walkie talkie. "Murdoch? Really? What script are you reading? I think you've got the wrong character name."

There was a long silence and finally Eric's voice broke through again.

"I'm coming for you too, Lithgow."

Mr. Lithgow nodded approvingly and then spat back, "You'll never catch me, vampire!"

And with that, he jumped up and started running further up the mountain.

We weren't sure what to do and so we all just sat in the snow, waiting for Eric to come and save the day.

But Eric didn't come. Within about an hour, I heard the sound of my helicopter and looked up the side of the mountain to see John Lithgow in the pilot's seat, laughing maniacally as he flew towards us.

Suddenly, I saw Eric appear on the mountainside. He was hanging by one hand, showing off his muscles and taunting Mr. Lithgow to fly closer to him. As the helicopter flew closer, Eric reached down into the front of his sweatpants and pulled out a wad of cash. He began tossing the bills at the rotors of the helicopter and soon the helicopter scraped against the wall of rock, dangerously close to Eric.

Eric leapt towards the helicopter. (I'm not sure why he didn't just fly, but this was much more dramatic.) I watched him climb inside and begin to fight with Mr. Lithgow.

Mr. Lithgow lost control of the helicopter and I started to run. We were all standing directly beneath the helicopter and I had a feeling it was going to fall.

Sure enough, the helicopter crashed to the ground as I barely escaped its destructive path. I turned around and saw the helicopter lying on its side. The feet of all the bad guys were sticking out like the witch's in The Wizard of Oz and I knew, of course, that they were all dead.

Bill appeared from behind the wreckage, strolling casually towards me.

"You okay?" he shouted.

I gave him a thumbs up, too overcome with shock to speak.

I began walking towards the helicopter, terrified of what I might find. I saw Mr. Lithgow covered in blood, clearly dead. Eric was lying beside him, also covered in blood. I dropped to my knees and began to cry. I buried my face in my hands and wept like a baby.

"What is it, Sookie?" Eric asked, suddenly at my side.

Shocked, I opened my eyes and saw him standing by me, still bloody, but very much alive.

I threw myself into his arms and cried, "Oh, Eric!"

"Sly," he corrected me. "Please call me Sly."

I pulled back and looked into his eyes and said gently, "No, sweetie. Your name is Eric. Eric Northman. You had a little mental meltdown after you accidentally killed Selah Pumphrey and now you think you're Sylvester Stallone."

"Really?" he asked, obviously confused.

"Yes, baby. She was your first kill. But look, now you've killed a bunch more people, including an award-winning actor."

Eric looked at the pairs of boots sticking out from under the helicopter and I could see the realization hit him. "I'm not Sylvester Stallone?"

"No, honey. You're not."

He pulled the bloody scrap of fabric from his head, releasing his beautiful blond hair.

"You're Eric Northman," I said gently.

"Eric Northman," he repeated, as if saying it for the first time.

He pulled the bandolier (thank you for that word, Mr. Lithgow) from his chest and tossed it into the snow.

I touched his face and he smiled, and for the first time since I'd arrived, I saw Eric—my Eric. I kissed his lips and he held me tight, and I knew that everything would be okay again. I had my Eric back.

~O~O~O~O~

It had been exactly a year since that crazy day in the Rocky Mountains—a year to the day when Eric and I stepped onto the red carpet at the Emmy Awards in Hollywood.

Eric looked as handsome as ever in his tux and I had on a beautiful and glamorous evening gown. We waved to the crowds in the viewing stands and posed for the photographers before we went inside the Kodak Theater.

We met Bill at our seats and watched the ceremony until the most important category was announced: Outstanding Made for TV Movie or Miniseries.

When we heard the name announced—First Blood, Kinda Sorta—Bill, Eric and I stood and walked up to the stage, accidentally stepping on Alan Ball's toes on the way to the end of our aisle. It was the first movie we had ever produced, of course, and we were thrilled to receive our Emmy.

I stood before the microphone and thanked my friends and family, except Jason, who, as usual, had been no help to me at all.

When I was through, I stepped back and watched as Bill gave his acceptance speech, so excited that his fangs dropped down a little.

When it was Eric's turn, he stood and took a deep unnecessary breath before beginning.

"I'd first like to thank Bill and Sookie for suggesting we make this film," he said. "And, of course, I'd like to thank Sylvester Stallone for portraying me in the film."

I heard a loud, "Yo, Adrian!" come from the audience in that unmistakable voice.

Eric continued, "But most of all, I'd like to thank my vampire child, John Lithgow. Without his expertise and connections in Hollywood, we never would have been able to make this film. And of course, he gave us a brilliant performance playing himself in the film. You're the best, John."

The audience went wild as Eric held up his Emmy, beaming with pride. I saw Mr. Lithgow waving from the audience.

Eric looked at me and said quietly so that no one could hear him over the loud applause, "Thank you, Sookie, for saving me from myself. Thank you for suggesting I turn John to counter my debilitating guilt over killing Selah. And thank you for your unconditional love."

He leaned down and gave me a kiss as the crowd cheered and then we all walked offstage together to the theme for Rocky—now also the theme song for our Emmy-winning film, First Blood, Kinda Sorta—the film that brought my Eric back to me.

XXX


End file.
